The Natural

The natural street-musician will follow you once

you have dropped a coin into the hat. Because

the cloying mountain of minds



presses in, because of frailty.

Because the airy mind is frail. The street-musician

says, "Examine your pride,

examine yourself—I am not the government."



You say, "To my mind, I have not gone enough 

to concerts, to enough bars to enough

of those corners necessary to shake

the follow and the following."



"The mind and the air

need each other," he counters,

"as governance slides from stone

to brick. Look outside—idylls and fanfares



have blended into a bath-warm middle—you

are being followed and, I suspect, learning

about how the mind of an entertainer

functions. That that hive

is no government of stone."